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Comment by Mydayyy | Hacker News Reader

His point stands tho. Think about mobile games, where games are significantly cheaper (0.99€-5€). That install fee will hit a lot different than for high priced desktop titles (30€+). In addition think about the turnover in mobile games.

The Unity Page does not mention free games with micro transactions, but especially there the user turnover is way higher. A lot of people will install it, play it for a few minutes (or days) and remove it again. Will the developer pay those install fees too?

This entire thing seems not really thought out.

I am also wondering what about trolls, who spoof HWID (or whatever the unique install id is based of) and spam-install it

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> I am also wondering what about trolls, who spoof HWID (or whatever the unique install id is based of) and spam-install it

You don't even need to get that technical. It seems that using a privacy respecting browser that blocks cookies and fingerprinting techniques will identify a simple page refresh as an install.

Does unity want to support games where the vast majority uninstall it within a few minuites?

Seems like having less of those games on Unity might improve Unity's brand.

I would think it would be weird for a game engine business to try to curate what type of creative talent utilizes their game engine product. It would seem to me from monetizing installs that you'd want anybody and everybody using your game engine product to generate _anything_ to get installed one or more times by a consumer.

To make your case, I think it would be more relevant if Unity decided to charge game publishers extra for publishing games that were only installed for some short amount of time on a device before going uninstalled. That is not the case here.

Anyway, I see where your mind is at, but I think the conclusion you came to is not correct. I don't see what incentive Unity would have to keep low quality games off of their product, they actively would want them to succeed to hit the thresholds for monetization. And besides, everybody already knows to judge the tool based on its potential, rather than judge it based on some mediocre games that came out and flopped, because that happens with any engine.

Because low quality games devalue the brand.

It's often easy to guess which engine a game is made on, because they tend to share certain elements (UI, rendering techniques etc).

If your engine is associated with poor quality games, than high value games may decide to use a different engine.

> His point stands tho.

Except it doesn't. Selecting Unity as your game engine is a business decision and part of your business model. If you cannot make a profit in your game after the fee, it's not Unity's fault that you have a bad business model.

If you're just going to spam the same thought over and over again then you should go to reddit where that lack of originality is appreciated.

What about the fact that Unity is changing their business model and making it retroactive to fuck over people?

Ah, this explains so much!

I once crapped out a game engine over a weekend using python. I called it turdPy.

I released it under a commercial license of $20000 per CPU thread per developer device per day to use. With an additional 80-20 revenue share model (80% going to me) once the devs sell their game.

I never got any customers, and I always wondered why. But now I understand that it was because game studios simply didn't have a good enough business model.

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